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 ^i 
 
 PERSONAL LOYALTY TO CHRIST THE 
 SECRET OF MISSIONARY EFFORT. 
 
 A SEKMON, 
 
 ^reacj^cij in St. "^thm Cfewrrj^, €a.toji Squjir-e, 
 
 DURING THE 
 
 SESSION OF THE LAMBETH CONFERENCE, 
 
 JULY, 1878. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 HIGHT REV. L. G. MYLNE, D.D., 
 
 LORD BISHOP OF BOMBAY. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 PRINTED FOR 
 
 §rij« ^Dcidg for i^e ^ropagatioit of l^t OSospel in foreign ^arfs, 
 
 19, DELAHAY STREET, S.W. 
 
 1878. 
 
 [16]
 
 LONDON 
 
 R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAVLOR, 
 
 BREAD 3TREF.T BILL.
 
 PERSONAL LOYALTY TO CHRIST THE SECRET 
 OF MISSIONARY EFFORT. 
 
 Judges xi. 24. 
 
 " Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess ? So 
 whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them will we 
 possess." 
 
 The representation of characters and events in the liistorical 
 books of Holy Scripture contrasts strangely with the treatment 
 of the same subjects which in history, in biography, or in fiction 
 would be natural to our own generation. From a spiritual, a 
 moral, and a literary point of view tlie same contrast presents 
 itself. The whole of our modern writing is permeated with an 
 all-pervading self-consciousness which makes it impossible for 
 us simply to narrate how people spoke and acted. The form of 
 our literary activity is analytical rather than creative, and we 
 are impelled to be always searching deep below men's words 
 and acts to find the underlying principles on which their conduct 
 was based. Whether our subject be the life of an individual or 
 the history of a whole section of the human race we regard it 
 as the concrete exhibition of underlying abstract principles. 
 "We set ourselves to analyse and discriminate the various forces 
 whose working it displays. In the life and character of indi- 
 vidual men we must get the abnormal actions distinguished from 
 what was natural and uniform, we must discriminate the here- 
 ditary tendencies from those which were peculiar to the man, 
 and again in the hereditary qualities we must mark off those 
 which are characteristic of the family from those which are 
 common to the nation. And so it comes about with many of
 
 4 Personal Loyalty to Christ the Secret of Missionary Effort. 
 
 lis that we move among principles and abstractions more easily 
 than among- living characters. We pass instinctively from the 
 concrete to the abstract. We regard the men and women, nay, 
 the nations and races of histiny, as the exponents of principles 
 and the puppets of forces which they themselves had little hand 
 in creating, and of whose working they were profoundly uncon- 
 scious. How firmly soever we believe in the freedom of our 
 personal actions, we come to ignore free-will as a factor in the 
 larger movements of history, and even perhaps in the acts of 
 our fellows. 
 
 The centuries which saw the production of the histories and 
 biographies of Holy Scripture were as emphatically ages of 
 creation as ours is an age of analysis. The actors and the events 
 alike are presented to the mind of the reader in simple tragic 
 guise. ]Men speak and act before us, they cross and recross the 
 stage, they work out their share in the drama, and then disappear 
 from our view ; and we are left to infer for ourselves what their 
 motives and their characters were. Their words and their 
 actions are given in their relation to God and to their fellow 
 men, not to any abstract principles by which nations or indi- 
 viduals are noted. Yet it is impossible for us to approach them 
 except in the spirit of our own day. It is not possible, even if 
 it were desirable, that we should divest ourselves, when we read 
 our Bibles, of the intellectual habits and associations with 
 which we approach other books. We must analyse Moses or 
 Jephthah as we should analyse Cromwell or Marlborough. 
 
 And so in the choice of my text I have tried to seize the 
 critical moment in the development of the tragedy of Jephthah's 
 vow. I have chosen the words which give us the key to the 
 most extraordinary act of his life, which will show, if I am not 
 mistaken, how the most abnormal act which he committed was 
 but the outcome of a habit of mind by which all his conduct 
 was noted. That habit of mind I shall hope to show you was 
 one by no means peculiar to a rude and uncivilized age. The 
 very same mental confusion as to the relations of truth and 
 error in the most momentous of religious questions, which led 
 Jephthah to sacrifice his daughter in the thought that he was 
 honouring God, is that which inclines us to look with conteinpt 
 
 uiuc 1
 
 Tlie Keynote of Jephthalis Conduct. 5 
 
 on the evangelistic work of the Church. The key-note then of 
 all Jephthah's conduct is struck in the following words : — 
 " Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee 
 to possess ? Even so whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive 
 out from before us, them will we possess." 
 
 But before you can appreciate the force which they appear to 
 me to convey, I must briefly remind you of the place which 
 tliey occupy in the narrative as a whole. They are in modern 
 political language the answer to the protocol of a foreign power. 
 A social and a political outlaw from the circumstances of his 
 birth and conduct, Jephthah has been called in an hour of dire 
 need to take his place at the head of the army by which a 
 foreign invasion is to be repelled. And the bastard captain of 
 free-lances shows himself equal to the occasion, alike as a 
 politician and as a general. The message of the invading 
 monarch has challenged Israel's possession of Gilead on the 
 ground of a presumptive right inherent in the children of 
 Ammon. Jephthah's answer traverses the claim on the grounds 
 on which it was put forM'ard. But after denying that the land 
 in dispute had ever belonged to his opponents, he leaves the 
 ground of political prescription and falls back on the provi- 
 dential decrees of the divinities of Judah and of Ammon. 
 
 Israel's claim to the disputed territory is based by him on the 
 decree of Jehovah, and the providential ordinance of the God of 
 Israel is put forward as of equal validity with that of Chemosh, 
 the god of the Ammonites. The two divinities are spoken of 
 as holding an equally real place in the category of actual 
 existences. Jehovah, it is assumed, may preside over a stronger 
 and more warlike civilization, and the enemies of Israel may 
 beware how they provoke the nation who honour Him. But 
 Chemosh is acknowledged to be a god exactly in the same 
 sense with Jeliovah, to exercise a similar departmental juris- 
 diction, only over a different land and people. Let worshipper 
 and worshipped then agree to a policy of mutual respect for 
 each other's possessions and providence. Chemosh and you, 
 Jehovah and me, and let us agree to leave one another alone. 
 
 But the king of the invading army refuses to be warned 
 off by any such aigument as this, and the question must be
 
 6 Personal Loyalty to Christ the Secret of missionary Effort. 
 
 settled by force of arms. And so Jephthali begins to bethink 
 himself how most effectually to bring to bear the forces of his 
 supernatural ally. He has boasted of the support of Jehovah, 
 and he will have Chemosh enlisted against him. How can he 
 make his boast a reality, and crush the invaders and their 
 god ? He knows how Chemosh will be honoured — that no 
 sacrifice will be considered too costly, no effusion of blood too 
 barbarous, to propitiate the deity of a people who are at best the 
 near relations of the Moabitish worshippers of Moloch. And 
 so he will be even with his enemies in the promises which he 
 makes to his God, 
 
 " And Jephthali vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou 
 slialt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into my 
 liands, then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the 
 doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the 
 children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord's, and I will offer 
 it up for a burnt-offering." 
 
 No reserve was made in the promise, and no scruple inter- 
 fered with its fulfihnent. An attempt has been made by some 
 commentators to soften down the harshness of the story by 
 insisting on what is told us about the daughter bewailing her 
 virginity before the time for the sacrifice arrived, and on what 
 is added as a conclusion — " And she knew no man." But, on 
 the point of the sacrifice itself, the sacred narrative is quite 
 clear. The victim herself sees nothing strange in the fate which 
 was to come upon her. She urges her father to be firm, and 
 rejoices in sacrificing her life, since God has given the victory 
 to Israel. And the consummation of the sacrifice is spoken of 
 in the plainest terms. " And it came to pass at the end of two 
 months, that she returned unto her father, who did with her 
 according to his vow which he had vowed." 
 
 But since it was regarded as a misfortune and a reproach that 
 any Israelitish woman sliould not be among the happy mothers 
 who filled up the ranks of the chosen people, the writer adds, 
 to lend fresh pathos to a story which was already so touching, 
 the thought that she never was a mother — " And she knew 
 no man." 
 
 Were it not for the vein of thought which appears in that
 
 False Theories of Belujion. 7 
 
 message about Chemosh and Jehovah, we should he at a loss to 
 conceive how any Israelite could have supposed that in sacri- 
 ficing his child he was honouring the Lord who spoke from 
 Sinai; how He who gave the commandment, "Thou shalt do 
 no murder" — He who had driven out the Canaanite nations for 
 this above all their many sins, that they burnt their children 
 to Moloch, could be supposed capable of being propitiated by 
 the offering of a fair young life in fulfilment of a thoughtless 
 vow. But if once the Giver of the Law and the abomination of 
 the children of Ammon, had been ranked in Jephthah's thought 
 as two beings equally real, ruling each in his petty sphere over 
 the destinies of a single nation, it is a matter easily compre- 
 hensible that similarity of character should be ascribed to them. 
 Other gods delighted in human blood — why, then, should 
 Jehovah not do so ? Such a thought might perhaps have been 
 impossible among the tribes on the home side of Jordan. But 
 Jephthah and his fellow -tribes men were the descendants of those 
 who were left on the wilderness side of the river: and the 
 apprehensions of the first settlers there had apparently been but 
 too well fulfilled. Their children had, spiritually at least, been 
 cut off from the commonwealth of Israel. 
 
 That erroneous conception of God, and of the relations of 
 false religions to the truth, which led Jephthah to inil3ue his 
 hands in the blood of his innocent darling, stains the hands of 
 Christian people now with the murder of souls for which Christ 
 died. A rude age treats the deities of the heathen as though 
 they were living realities, in the same sense as Jehovah the 
 Lord. A refined age treats the Triune God as though He were 
 a shadowy creation of the religious instincts of His creatures, 
 in the same sense as the deities of the heathen. And the result 
 in both cases is the same. It matters not whether we level up 
 the false or level down the true. It matters not whether the 
 territory in dispute be the actual material sovereignty over a 
 strip of Syrian pasture, or the empire over the souls and con- 
 sciences of a hundred millions of mankind. The man who has 
 reduced all religions to a dead level of truth or falsehood, will 
 say in effect to foreign nations — Chemosh and you, Jehovah 
 and me — let us agree to leave each other alone : Bouddha
 
 8 - Personal Loyalty to Christ the Secret of Missionary Effort. 
 
 and Christ, the Crescent and the Cross, what are they but 
 symbols of the Unseen? If the moral life of mankind desi- 
 derates a basis of operation in some belief in the supernatural, 
 what matters it whether that basis be secured by this religion 
 or that? With the advancement or the backwardness of the 
 civilisation which is presided over by any divinity, the belief 
 in his character and attributes will be a more or less embodi- 
 ment of the best aspirations of the race. And as any belief in 
 the Unseen is but a remnant of barbarous superstition, the wise 
 man A\'ill be content to wait for its gradual and natural elimi- 
 nation. He will not trouble himself in the meantime with its 
 being a little more adequate or a little less ridiculous. Until 
 hard coin is paid down, any counters will serve our turn. The 
 gold will bear our owai superscription, will be stamped with 
 the likeness of the last thinker, and carry his arms on the 
 reverse. For the token — why, Vishnu or Jesus — one Incarna- 
 tion is as good as another. 
 
 I have been putting, my friends, in all its native hideousness, 
 the contemptuous dismissal of the supernatural, which is the 
 logical outcome of much of our contemporary thinking on the 
 subject of comparative religion. Few, perhaps, if any, of those 
 wb.o hear me would be prepared to accept, or are even accustomed 
 to hear, such a treatment of the most sacred of subjects. But 
 there is much loose thinking on such topics which, while it 
 would refuse to be formulated in a distinctly anti-Christian 
 sense, yet without fairly facing its position, assumes an attitude 
 towards foreign missions \vhich only such a statement could 
 justify. It clothes itself in such phrases as these — That many 
 a good Hindu puts the mass of us Christians to shame — That it 
 is better to leave people alone in the system in which they have 
 been brought up than to turn good heathens into possibly in- 
 different Christians — That it is more important that people 
 sliould be sincere in what they believe than that they should 
 believe exactly as we do. Or Christian charity is appealed to 
 to induce us to leave to their idols men Avhom Jesus died to 
 redeem. Or we are told that tlie exact form of truth which 
 appeals to Western civilization must necessarily be quite un- 
 fitted to tlie subtler minds of the East ; that Brahmanism is the
 
 The Basis of the Claims of Chiistianifi/. 9 
 
 form of aspiration after the same Divine Beiug whom we 
 worship, which has suited the Hindu mind since a period long 
 anterior to the rise and spread of Christianity. 
 
 Well, my friends, if these things are true, we had better 
 acknowledge at once that Christian missions are an anachronism 
 and an impertinence, a survival of that narrow insularity which 
 led Englishmen a generation or two back to regard Frenchmen 
 simply as subjects for contemptuous caricatures ; which thought 
 of foreigners generally as existing to gratify British pride with 
 a pleasing sense of superiority. Unless Christianity be in such 
 sense true that all other religions are false ; unless it is differ- 
 entiated from them as being a revelation from God, while they 
 are but blind gropings of humanity ; unless it be true, as the 
 Apostle says, that there is a daemonic element in heathenism, 
 even although it be a dispensation under which men are judged 
 according to their lights, — then it is a simple impertinence on 
 our part to offer to communicate to other nations the religion 
 in which we have been brought up. The religions which are 
 professed in the East have in some cases come down to their 
 professors with the sanction of immemorial antiquity. In others 
 they are older than Christianity, though a date can be assigned 
 for their rise. In others, though younger than Christianity, they 
 can lay claim to the hoary traditions of centuries of continuous 
 existence. Is it for us then to approach men who live in the 
 practice of such religious as these, and, stooping from the exalted 
 attitude of a more advanced material civilization, to hold out to 
 them, with patronising condescension, the offer of a share in 
 beliefs which have only half evangelized our own country ? Are 
 we to ask them to abandon social customs, which are conse- 
 crated by all the associations of seventy or a hundred genera- 
 tions, to strip off as a mere incrustation spiritual principles or 
 ceremonial observances which have become a part of their 
 national life ? Certainly not, if the difference between us be 
 but a difference of forms and expressions. Certainly not, if the 
 beings whom we worship are in any sense co-ordinate with each 
 other. Certainly not, if absolute trust is to be found on netthex 
 side. 
 
 But we shall each of us answer these questions in accordance
 
 10 PuTSonal Loyalty to Christ the Secret of Missionary Effort. 
 
 witli our personal attitude towards the religion of Jesus Christ. 
 And there could hardly be a better test of our individual 
 spiritual vitality than the state of oar mind and feeling towards 
 the missionary work of the Church. According to what Jesus 
 Christ is to us will be our disposition towards the spread of 
 the Gospel. What, then, are Christ and His Church to your 
 individual soul ? 
 
 Putting aside the impertinent levity which disregards Jesus 
 Christ altogether, and dealing only with the honest and good 
 heart which bows before the moral grandeur of the crucified 
 Prophet of Nazareth, I would ask you individually, my friends, 
 if you have little interest in missions, what interest have you in 
 Christ ? Do you regard Him as only the chiefest among the 
 mighty names of the host to which you owe a reverent memory 
 for the benefits they have conferred upon your race ? Where 
 have been those among the men before our time to whom we 
 owe a debt of gratitude for the moral treasure they have be- 
 queathed to us ? The thrill of their self-sacrificing love has 
 descended through successive generations till it has roused a 
 noble enthusiasm in our own laggard hearts. The common- 
 place life of all humanity has been raised by their heroism or 
 their genius to a level unattainable without them. The fresh- 
 ness of their thoughts, or the nobility of their sentiments, has 
 made high thinking or devoted living seem within the grasp of 
 thousands who without them would have been selfish and un- 
 interesting. Is our Lord to you the greatest of these ? or is He 
 something incomparably greater ? Is His life to you a great 
 past fact, or is it something present and eternal ? The grace 
 given by a living Saviour is something different in kind from 
 the moral thrill which is communicated from a dead benefactor 
 and teacher. Jesus Christ can give you both. Has He given 
 you, is He giving you, that which no benefactor can give ? The 
 influence of His Spirit in the world is still a wind that bloweth 
 where it listeth. Do you hear the sound of it with your ears 
 without knowing whence it cometh and whither it goetli ? Or 
 does it ruffle the mere surface of your spirit without stirring 
 its inmost depths ? Its gales are about you as you move, and 
 you cannot but be conscious of their blowing. If they are
 
 The Incarnation the Religion of the Gospel. 11 
 
 the breath of life to your spirit, then Jesus is your Saviour 
 indeed. 
 
 Again, the presence of Jesus Himself is a fact in the life of 
 the Church. Is it a fact in your personal life ? Is it the very 
 essence of Christianity to you that He takes men one by one, 
 men sinful and unworthy as you are ; that He takes you yourself 
 and your dear ones, and knits you up into union with God ? 
 God manifest in the flesh — not for three-and -thirty years made 
 manifest and then withdrawn into the recess of the '.Divine 
 Unity, but God manifest in the flesh for all time as He comes 
 to us day by day in the Sacrament of His ineffable love — God 
 marking us partakers of the Divine Nature by His exceed- 
 ing great and precious promises — God projecting Himself as it 
 were into the very sphere of human life — God moving, as in 
 Jerusalem of old, amid the busy throng of men in the heart 
 which He has made the throne of His sacramental Presence — 
 God the stirring vital power of thousands of millions of hearts 
 in all the many ages of His Church — the Son of God become 
 the Son of Man that the sons of men might be made the sons 
 of God — that, and nothing short of that, is Christianity. Is 
 Christianity that to you ? to be made partaker of Christ, and 
 in Christ to be partaker of God ; this is the religion of the 
 Incarnation, this is the religion of the Gospels, this is the 
 religion of the Sacraments, this is the religion of Jesus Christ. 
 Take anything short of this for your fundamental conception of 
 Christianity, take anything short of this for your personal 
 relation to its Founder, and Christian Missions I allow may 
 well want interest to your mind. If Christ be not your personal 
 Saviour, your Saviour by uniting you to God, your Saviour by 
 Himself being God in eternal union with the Father, yet man 
 by embracing your nature, your Saviour by acting as the 
 Mediator between the Father and yourself, then small wonder if 
 you are stolidly indifferent to His claims upon the allegiance of 
 the world. Ijut if the arms which were stretched upon the 
 Cross were the arms of God Himself opened wide to embrace 
 all humanity in the grasp of an everlasting love, if the gulf 
 between God and the creature was spanned when God became 
 man, and the separation between the Sinless and the sinner was
 
 12 Personal Loyalty to Christ the Secret of Missionary Effort. 
 
 done away by the sacrifice of tlie Cross ; and if all that is a fact 
 of to-day by the power inherent in the Sacraments to annihilate 
 time and space, if the pierced Hand reached forth in the Sacra- 
 ments has been laid upon yon individually, and with gentle, 
 loving compulsion has drawn you to the riven Side, then can 
 you, and dare you, be indifferent to the millions who know not 
 the Saviour ? You pray Him to remember you when He cometh 
 into His Kingdom. Then spread that Kingdom on earth by all 
 the means in your power. You hide yourself in the Rock of 
 Ages ; then remember the love that cleft it. It is the very 
 meanness of basest ingratitude to accept these benefits from 
 Him and to offer Him nothing in return. You will not, you 
 cannot be guilty of it. Nay, if you have no wish to spread His 
 Kingdom, it shows that you cannot belong to it. Oar ingrati- 
 tude as a nation and as a Church has been borne by His marvel- 
 lous patience, and He is calling us still to repentance, and giving 
 us opportunities of amendment. Bat our candlestick must be 
 removed out of its place if the amendment is long delayed. 
 Eouse tliyself, then, to play a man's part in the revival of the 
 work of God. Clear thyself at least of the responsibility of 
 sitting still and doing nothing when God calls thee to be stirring 
 and active. Go forth to meet the Bridegroom with thine own 
 lamp trimmed and ready. Nay, plead with Him to hasten His 
 coming, and set thyself to look for and hasten unto it. And, if 
 thou art conscious to thyself of individual as of national sloth, 
 of indifference to the pleading of thy Saviour, of want of love to 
 the souls of men ; if thyself art responsible in any part for the 
 judgments that are impending over the Church for souls 
 neglected in their heathenism, and opportunities irrevocably 
 thrown away, then join in the penitent prayer of the prophet 
 who saw God advancing as He rode through the waters of the 
 deep on His horses and His chariot of salvation. 
 
 " Lord, I have heard Thy sj)eech and was afraid : Lord, 
 revive Thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the 
 years make known ; in wrath remember mercy."
 
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